


Flickers of Stardust for the Lady

by Arrinconada_en_mi_Esquina



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's
Genre: Day 1: Stardust and Scrap Metal, Day 2: Starting Line, Day 3: Unicorns and Rainbows, Gen, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's Month 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-30 16:03:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11466948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arrinconada_en_mi_Esquina/pseuds/Arrinconada_en_mi_Esquina
Summary: For his 6th birthday, Yusei decided he would celebrate Martha's birthday too.





	Flickers of Stardust for the Lady

**Author's Note:**

> Late prompt fills and uneven writing, I know, I know. I'm sorry. I haven't written in ages but I'd be darned if I didn't contribute to the event somehow and I'm afraid I can't art or edit, so here we are.
> 
> "Dr. Shcmidt" is that doctor that operated on Yusei after his duel with Kiryu. He didn't have a name in the original Japanese version of the anime, but apparently this is what he was called in the English dub. I considered giving him a Japanese name, but most people living at the Satellite had English/Western names, so I decided to roll with it.

“An astronaut.”

The 5-year-old’s jaw slowly fell open with a soft, prolonged gasp and his eyes widened so much that Martha almost had to hold her breath to keep from laughing.

“You mean like--” he paused and took a deep breath, mouthing words as he tried to recollect his thoughts, “like-- like-- going to the stars? And the moon and the sun?”

He always spoke with a sort of hushed voice. It didn’t strike Martha as a thing of shyness, though. It was more of a calculated response. Yusei was an impressively thoughtful child. He didn’t speak as loudly as most of the other kids in the orphanage, but he spoke far more often. Usually, about whatever new thing he happened to learn each day. On days when brand new knowledge didn’t come looking for him, he’d quickly go out of his way looking for some, and what easier way than following Martha all around the house, asking literally every question that came to his mind all day long.

Right now, he was watching her do the laundry when he thought of asking what she wanted to be when she grew up and he wouldn’t take “I already grew up” as an answer.

“Well, you can’t actually land on stars or on the sun,” Martha replied.

“Why not?”

“Because the sun and the stars are made of hot gas and fire. Astronauts would burn alive if they tried.”

He brought his chin to rest atop the washing machine, tapping his fingers on the cold metal with a tiny frown on his face. She half-expected him to question how they knew it was made of fire if they had never landed on it, but instead he nodded along.

“Did they get really close to it and then when they feeled it was too hot they just-- they went around and drove away?” he asked. He firmly pressed eight fingertips against the top of the machine and urged the rest of his body weight to drop back, pulling himself back to a safe stand when his fingers slipped too close to the edge.

“Maybe,” Martha hummed a little distracted. “I don’t know all the details.”

“Do you know all the details when you turn into a austronaut?”

“I would if I ever became one, but I don’t think I will,” she said, then gave him a scolding glare when she caught him hoisting himself over the washing machine before dropping back to his bare feet.

“But isn’t it your dream?” he asked.

His eyes stared at her unflinchingly and with a great deal of concern, and she couldn’t help letting a chuckle slip out.

“It was,” she answered with a confident smile. “Back when I was a little girl. Well. I was bigger than you at the time, buuuut... not by much.”

“You were a little girl before?”

If she got a handful of pocket change every time a kid asked her that, she could buy all of Japan two times over. She sighed and gave him a resigned look.

“Yes, Yusei. I was a little girl once.”

Yusei lowered his head and shuffled his feet. He must have detected he said something she didn’t like, but she didn’t want him to feel bad for asking about things he didn’t know. It was very important to her that her kids ask as many questions as they could and she absolutely adored Yusei’s curiosity.

She ruffled his hair and pulled him into a hug. He immediately wrapped his arms around her and looked up at her, again with wide eyes.

“But why dun you wanna be a austronaut anymore?” he asked eagerly. “Is it because you learned the sun was too hot? Because you can still walk on the moon. All the other austronauts do it in the videos.”

“I lost interest, I guess. Besides, if I decided to be an astronaut now, I’d have to leave you guys for space and I don’t want to do _that!_ ”

“Well--!” he spluttered with ill-contained excitement, jumping to his tippy-toes and making throwing motions at the ceiling. “Maybe not, ‘cause! ‘Cause maybe you can take us with you to the moon! If-if like! If like the other austronauts say it’s okay, then you can take us all! We can build a house on the rocket and then use a crane to move it on the ground when we reach the moon.”

Martha doubled over in laughter. “Honey, that would be _dangerous!_ ”

“W-well...” he paused and turned his sights down, eyes dancing side to side as he thought carefully, “we could... We could tie it down safe with a loooooot of ropes... So it doesn’t fall down on the way.”

“It still wouldn’t be very safe. Besides even if we could take everyone, we would still be missing a lot of stuff that’s only here on Earth.”

“If you mean like water and food, we can take some in the fridge.”

“We would run out,” she said as she pulled him into another hug. “And we wouldn’t be here for all the other things, like holidays and new card releases.” She heard a little gasp escape him, but no other response. “We wouldn’t have flowers or grass either. Now I don’t know about you, but sometimes I like to sit outside, run my toes on the grass and smell the flowers. If I want to see the stars, I’ll just look out into the horizon at night. It won’t have an awful lot of them to look at, but something’s something.”

“Hmm... okay.”

\----------

Everyone has a birthday, apparently.

Martha made his second-favorite breakfast today and happily announced that they were a week -- that’s seven days -- away from Yusei’s birthday, which was a wonderful revelation, of course. Everyone at the table had been eagerly discussing what their plans would be for it and then one of them asked if there was any chance of them getting a cake this time around. Before Martha could answer, however, one of the newer kids at the orphanage asked what they meant by “this time” and soon learned that every kid at the orphanage had their birthday celebrated every year.

Then everything got very quiet very suddenly. After a few minutes, the kid who asked the question started crying. She claimed she didn’t have a birthday, but Martha said that she did, she just didn’t know.

“How are you so sure I have one?!” the little girl had demanded amidst tears.

“Because everyone has a birthday,” Martha reassured her.

This immediately set off an alarm bell in Yusei’s head. He waited until his foster sister calmed down and everyone ran off to do chores or play outside after breakfast to approach Martha.

“Is it true everyone has a birthday?” he asked.

“No doubt.”

“So you have one, too?”

“If you’re going to stand here with me all day, you might as well help me dry these dishes,” she replied.

His feet quickly scattered as he hurried to drag the little stand he and his foster siblings always used to reach the sink. He settled it on the perfect spot possible, where he was close enough to speak privately with Martha but not so close that he wouldn’t be able to reach the dish rack.

“So?” he asked eagerly.

“Yes, Yusei. I do have a birthday.”

“But it’s not every year because you’re not a kid, right?”

Martha laughed. Very loudly. “Oh, I _wish_ I could skip some birthdays! No, dear. I have one every single year, just like you and everyone else.”

There was already a stack of dishes accumulating next to him while he was still busy drying up the first plate he was handed. This was the only reason he hated helping with the dishes. He always worked so hard to dry them carefully so the water wouldn’t pool underneath the rack and so that it wouldn’t slip out of one’s grip and fall into oblivion, but Martha was so fast at washing them -- she was really good at running everything in the house, really -- that she would end up helping him dry them. And then she would end up drying most of them up. And then he felt like he didn’t really help at all. But Martha always said that she would prefer he helped a little rather than not at all. How honest she was in that statement, he wasn’t sure; she usually let him skip dish duty anyway.

“Why dun we celebrate your birthday this week, then?” he asked as he tried to hurry himself and keep up with the dishes. “I dun mind waiting until next year so I can have my birthday.”

The speedy clutter of the dishes stopped but the water kept running. Yusei looked up at Martha to see if anything was wrong and found her staring at him. She looked a little bit surprised. Then she quickly pulled him into a hug and kissed his temple.

“Aww, my little Yusei, you’re such a sweet boy,” she said, then immediately let go of him and wasted no time getting back to work. “We don’t have to cancel or replace anyone’s birthday to celebrate mine. We can celebrate it just fine, I just,” she shrugged, “I’m getting a little old and very tired, and it just doesn’t matter much to me anymore.”

“Everyone’s birthday matters!” Yusei declared.

“Hmph. Welp. I won’t argue with you there. I _am_ glad I have a birthday, even if I don’t celebrate it. And who knows? Maybe someday, I might feel like celebrating it again.”

“Would it be okay if I gave you a birthday gift?” Yusei asked.

“Oh, I would love that,” Martha said.

He placed the second dish he dried up on the rack and turned back to the stack, where there was now seven, eight, nine, ten... and then lots more after that... He was sure someone had tried to teach him how to count this high before, but the numbers just weren’t coming to him right away. It didn’t matter. Martha was already getting a rag of her own to help with the drying.

“What would you like?” he asked sheepishly, quietly hoping she wouldn’t ask for something dish-washing-related. That would be the second-worst thing she could answer with, he thought.

“I will love whatever you can get me,” she replied earnestly.

Yusei sighed. That would be the first-worst thing she could answer with.

\----------

There was a building in Satellite with a lot of chairs, desks and other materials. A lot of it had been ransacked, but when Yusei had entered it for the first time in his life, he had been surprised to find there was still a lot of stuff to be found inside. He asked around and everyone had an answer for why they never loot around the place. Most of the other kids didn’t know what to do with the materials inside. The adults’ answers were more uneven: some of them said that it reminded them of their old schools, which just made them sad; a few claimed that the stuff in it was useless; and others said that they wanted to leave it be out of respect.

“It used to be a community center,” one elder said to him. “It was a place ran with love and care for people who had very little or who were very alone.”

That sounded a lot like Martha’s house, if Yusei was honest. But when he asked Martha about it, she said there wasn’t anything in it they needed. He asked Dr. Schmidt about it and he just shrugged his shoulders.

“There might be some textbooks or almanacs there,” he said. “But I already have my fair share of those here. In fact, Martha’s been asking that I scan them so that we can save the text in the computer and clear the actual books from the house. They take up a lot of space and she thinks it would be a good idea to figure out a way to recycle the paper. Can’t say I disagree much.”

It had taken a few days of exploration and messing around, but Yusei had managed to find a way to get around the blockade on the stairs and move on to the elusive second floor. It was very intact. In fact, if it weren’t for the heavy dust and lack of lighting, it would look a lot like the hallway in Martha’s house.

Of the rooms there, he found he could only open one of them seeing as the other doors were locked. There were rows of small desks lined up and several blackboards stood at the end of the room. Thinking of the shows he saw on TV -- on the rare occasion that they could watch TV -- he was fairly sure this was how school classrooms looked. Or rather, how they would look if Satellite had any school of its own. Several hours of scavenging around in it yielded some excellent results. Books with very worn pages, notebooks (both used ones and empty ones), scissors, several markers and pencils... Honestly, it was a treasure trove. Surely, Martha would have to agree that these things were useful.

But before he could bring the valuable haul back home, there was a more pressing matter to attend to -- and this was the best opportunity for it.

Yusei organized all his findings to his own liking and strategically hid them in different desks. He would need to know where everything was when he came back tomorrow. He wished he could get started now, but it was already getting late and Martha always made him promise to be back home before it got dark outside.

\----------

“What are we doing here?” he whispered to himself with a high-pitched voice.

“Well, you see,” he answered his first whisper with a second, more gravelly-toned one, “we’re doin’ a experiment today.”

He gasped and put on a concerned face. “A experiment? But wouldn’t that be _dangerous?_ ”

“Nope,” he quickly replied with a smile. “Is a differen’ type of experiment, you see. You see! Because we’re a-gonna make a birthday present for Martha with all this stuff.”

“ _Stuff?!_ All I see is _junk_ , hon hon hon,” he whispered to himself with the snootiest voice he could come up with and nearly ended up giving himself a giggling fit over it.

“Ha!” he countered and confidently tapped the side of his noggin. “That’s where you’re wrong! Nothing is trash because everything and anything can be used!”

“But... but some grown-ups said that trash is just trash and--”

“Those grown-ups are wrong!” he shouted, only to clasp his hands over his mouth as quickly as he possibly could. He meant to say that, not shout it.

He poked his crazy, spiky-haired head over the only window in the room. No one seemed to be within earshot. The other buildings were too far and there didn’t seem to be anyone on the ground level below. He ran over to the door and pushed it open with care. No one was listening in on him in the hallway.

“You dummy,” he whispered to himself.

Yusei shut the door as best as he could and hurried to gather all the supplies from the desks, all neatly ordered to circle around the textbook he had borrowed from Dr. Schmidt.

“So wha’s the experiment?” he whispered in a new tone of voice, realizing there was only so little more he could do to keep up this game before he started to annoy himself with it. At least this time no one was around to call him a weirdo for talking to himself.

“We are going to maaaaaaaaaake,” he ran his finger over the side of the book until he felt his bookmark and wildly flung the book open, “a star!”

It was a picture of a starlit night unlike any he had ever seen before. He plopped down on his belly in front of the book and admired his discovery anew. It was going to be perfect.

\----------

It was not going perfectly.

First, he tried to make the star out of paper, using pages from the books he found around the room and cutting them out with scissors, but they looked flatter than how he pictured them in his head and just like the ones everyone had made a few months back during the most recent arts-and-crafts session Martha had held at the house. Nothing new or interesting.

It should pop and stick out. Also, obviously, it needed to glow because stars always glow.

He remembered going into an abandoned building with glass windows of different colors once. It always looked as if it glowed. It wasn’t hard to find glass around Satellite; the problem was that glass was dangerous. It would break too easily -- he knew this from experience -- and it could cut you up really badly --or so would Martha always say.

He found a green, empty glass beer bottle not too far from the community center’s entrance and he held on to it tightly with both hands. He maneuvered it back to the second floor with all the precision and patience required to transport a bomb. He sighed a sigh of relief upon arrival and placed it atop one of the desks, where he was certain it would be okay.

Except the instant he turned around, it rolled off and crashed on the floor. He jumped with a gasp and fled from the room, hopped off the stairs and ran out the building with all of his strengths, then hid for a good long while. If any grown-up caught him in the act, he would have been grounded for a long time and maybe his birthday would be cancelled. Martha would be so disappointed, it wouldn’t matter if he brought her a real star because no gift would be enough make her not be mad at him for many days to come.

So he waited and waited until the coast was clear. He feigned innocence and looked in all directions to ensure no one was following him as he made his way back to the building, back to the scene of the crime, whereupon he faked an undignified gasp at the broken bottle, just in case someone saw him. No one did, though, and he brushed all the glass away using the pages of a notebook. It was while looking for said notebook, however, that he encountered the secret stash of glitter he had forgotten he had hidden on his first day in the room.

That would have had to do the trick, he had figured. He tried gluing paper spikes on a rubber ball to make it stick out and he covered them in glitter, but it looked kind of ugly. And the glitter couldn’t glow on its own. It needed light.

Looking around the room for something that could glow on its own, he found an old desk lamp in the supply closet. He had ignored it the first couple of times he had come upon it, but now that he looked at it closely, he managed to recognize that it was just like the one that Martha kept on her sewing table. It was missing a light bulb, though.

So he ran back home and searched every room in the house until he came across Martha.

“Can I have a light bulb?” he asked.

Martha looked down at him and blinked. “No.”

“But I need it,” he insisted.

“Yusei, you have no use for a light bulb,” she said.

“It’s not for me,” he answered.

Martha raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms. “Then who is it for?”

“It’s-- hmm...”

He puffed up his cheeks and flicked at them rhythmically as he thought. If he told her it was for her, it would ruin the surprise, but if he didn’t tell her it was for a grown-up she might not give it to him. He blew out the air and yanked on her skirt.

“Is a secret and I can’t tell you,” he said, “but I promise I’m being very good and I’m not getting in trouble and it’s not for ‘nother kid because it’s for a grown-up thing and I promise I’ll bring it back to you so please please please can I have a light bulb like the one on your table with the clothes machine?”

Martha didn’t budge in what felt like forever. He wasn’t sure if she would be moving any time soon, wasn’t sure if he had made her mad. He picked his words very carefully, though. He knows that much.

Finally, she sighed and headed towards one of the closets in the house and took out a light bulb. She knelt down to his eye level and gave him a hard look.

“You promise you’ll be careful with it?”

“Yes.”

“If someone asked you for it...” she paused and turned her head to a nearby window, “they can keep it if they really need it, but I would prefer it if they asked me for it themself next time.”

“No one asked me to get it,” he replied. “But I can’t tell you why I need ‘cause is a secret.”

“Well,” she squeezed his little shoulders and gave him an even harder look, “promise me you’re being very careful with what you do and who you talk to out there, okay?”

“I promise,” he nodded. “But does this light bulb work for the lamp you have on the clothes machine table?”

“It does,” she said. “Which is the reason why I won’t be giving any more of these away unless an adult comes ask me for one. And only if it’s an emergency.”

“S’okay,” Yusei replied. “One’s 'nuff.”

And off he ran. Or rather, he started running before Martha grabbed him by the arm.

“No running with a light bulb in hand!” she scolded.

“Oh. Sorry, okay,” he whispered as he dutifully marched out of the house with a steady step.

Martha followed him all the way to the front yard and called out to him as soon as he started to slip away from her line of sight, reminding him to be careful and to come back before dark. Yusei was reasonably sure he could make it back to the center on time without running, but he would need to fasten his step. So he peeked back every three to six steps until he was sure Martha hadn’t followed him and then he walked as fast as he could. Some would even say he was running, but he wasn’t. He swore he was just really good at walking really fast.

As soon as he made it into his hideout, Yusei barricaded the door, placed the light bulb in the safest spot he could think of (on the floor of the emptiest corner in the room; he realized in hindsight that that was where he should have placed the bottle in the first place), retrieved the lamp, screwed the bulb in with delightful ease, plugged in the lamp, flipped the switch and--

“What?”

He flipped the switch on and off many times in one go, but nothing happened. Did Martha give him a faulty bulb?

“Oh,” he whispered. “Oh!” He slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Duh!”

How was it that Martha had explained it once? That there was no power in most of Satellite? That must have been it. No power in the building. He had forgotten in all of his excitement. He turned off the switch, unplugged the lamp and screwed the light bulb off.

“S’okay,” he said. “Martha said it worked so it definitely glows, just not here.” He scrambled around the supplies, collecting the necessary glue and glitter containers. A new inspiration had come to him on the way there, way better than all that paper and rubber band stuff from before. “I’ll just make it glittery now and then it will shine when I bring it back home.”

He uncapped the glue and squirted nearly the entire contents on the bulb, then readied the glitter for the assault.

\----------

It went horribly wrong.

Yusei painstakingly covered every single millimeter on the bulb with glitter, he got back home just as it was getting dark outside -- sure was a close one -- cleverly sneaking the lamp unseen. After successfully shooing away some of his nosier foster siblings, he locked himself in the bathroom, plugged the lamp in, turned off the bathroom light and flipped the switch. But nothing happened.

Clearly the lamp was busted from being so old, so he unscrewed the glittery bulb, waited until bed time and sneaked into the little room with sewing table in it once everyone was asleep. He flipped Martha’s lamp on and it worked perfectly with the bulb it already had. It was just a matter of switching the bulbs.

He worked as steadily and stealthily as he could, constantly stealing glances at the door to make sure he didn’t get caught. Slowly but surely, he replaced the bulbs and flipped the lamp on to test out his gift star.

But nothing happened?

Something did happen, actually. It was the same something that had happened with the lamp he hid in the bathroom, except back then he didn’t realize it was a something. Now that a little of the glitter had fallen off in a teeny-tiny spot, he could tell the light bulb was glowing... only from that spot. Not from the rest.

But how? He put extra glitter everywhere and it glows less rather than more. It made no sense. For a couple of days, he pondered long and hard on what went wrong. It was three days before his birthday when Martha announced during breakfast that she needed to run some errands outside of the house, so she was trusting everyone to stay put with Dr. Schmidt while she was gone. She’d be back before dark.

So he took the chance to bring his experiment to Dr. Schmidt. Martha always said that people of science helped each other figure things out.

“The problem is you added too much glitter,” Dr. Schmidt explained. “It made the glass of the light bulb opaque.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the light can’t shine through it.”

Yusei huffed and scoffed and pouted. His eyes started to get a little misty with frustration. He took a deep breath to compose himself. “Can we fix it?”

“Um, tsk. I’m afraid we probably can’t, little one,” the doctor replied. He turned the light bulb around and around, but no matter how much he inspected it, all he could do was frown. “It would probably be best to just throw it out.”

The doctor didn’t even have time to hand the light bulb back before Yusei had already dropped to the floor. The heels of his feet were raised and he balanced his curled up body on his toes, face buried in his hands as he sobbed quietly.

“Yusei, it’s fine,” the doctor insisted. “I’ll talk to Martha about getting you a new light bulb if you want.”

“That’s not it,” he sobbed softly.

“Then what is it?”

“I-I-I wanted to” -- a hiccup -- “make her a star! But I ruined it! And I’m out of time now!” he cried.

“You... you wanted to _make_ a star?”

Yusei nodded.

“You mean make a star of your own, right?”

He nodded again.

“For whom?”

“For” -- he gasped for air in-between sobs -- “For Martha. So that she could see stars at night.”

Dr. Schmidt reached out a hand and patted his head.

“How about we wait for her to return home,” he started, “and then you an I can go find a solution?”

\----------

Martha managed to get a cake this time around.

She had never been able to get Yusei a cake before and who knew if she would be able to pull that off ever again, but children live very much in the now so she figured it was best to put her worries away until the next birthday -- which was only a month and a half away.

Yusei had woken up exhausted. The past few days, he had headed off fairly early in the day alongside the good doctor and returned at night, almost nearing Yusei’s bed time.

“What on Earth are you doing with my boy, doctor?” she had asked him then.

“It’s more of a matter of what he’s doing with me, my dear Martha,” he joked. “He has big plans and needed my help. I’m only offering base assistance and adult supervision.”

On the night before his birthday, they arrived late, carrying bags full of school supplies. Textbooks, notebooks, pens, pencils, glitter, scissors, rulers, glue, markers, crayons and much more. Apparently no one had bothered working their way through the stairs blockade at the community center until Yusei, and even then it took the doctor a while to get through it since the boy had simply managed to find a little gap he could squeeze through.

“A couple of men may be delivering an important item during Yusei’s birthday party,” he said. “Until then, you should try helping him fall asleep. He’s so ready to bust with excitement, he might not be able to get a wink.”

She felt as though she could throttle that man in that moment. The nerve of the guy staying who-knows-where this late and dark out with one of her kids. Had he not been a trusted friend, she probably would have hunted him down to give him a good ass-kicking for it.

Ultimately, Yusei fell asleep sometime after midnight. It was the only reason she tried to give him at least an extra hour of sleep the next morning, but as soon as she woke up his foster siblings, they all ran to Yusei’s bedside to wake him up and wish him a happy birthday before she could stop them.

Oh well. Thankfully, Yusei always had the heart of an angel and he took the other kids’ excitement to motivate himself out of bed. They all eagerly fell in line for the bathroom, letting Yusei go in first as a cordiality, to wash up before breakfast. Everyone helped set up the table and no one let a single bite of their breakfast go to waste. Promptly afterwards, they split into little groups and ran around the house to get ready for the party. One group handled dishes, another would be in charge of setting up the picnic blankets on the front yard and the others would help organize the gifts. Ironic as it may sound, birthday mornings were the easiest mornings Martha had because of this. Though of course there was always the birthday nights to deal with and boy were those _a thing_...

Before they eat the cake -- naturally, they all erupted into cheers when learning that there was, indeed, a cake to be had on this joyous occasion -- Martha clapped her hands together and announced it was time for the gift exchange. As with every year, Yusei would get a little awkward and embarrassed at all the rapt attention he would get from his foster siblings as he unwrapped each of their homemade gifts -- all of them arts-and-crafts projects they secretly put together with Martha’s help, using scrap and supplies they collected themselves. Jack lived up to the other children’s expectations -- they would dub him “the King of Lazy Gifts” each and every birthday -- when it turned out he hadn’t even bothered to put his spare pieces together to make a gift. He literally just dumped a bunch of scrap metal and junk he had collected unto Yusei’s lap.

“Jack!” Martha scolded as she jumped off her chair and to her feet, glaring at the boy while the rest of the kids laughed their little hearts out.

“He’s gonna break it all apart in the end anyway!” Jack complained. “He just waits for a lot of days to go by so that no one gets upset but I dun care. Now it’s easier because he doesn’t hav’ta wait for it!”

She was loathed to admit it, but he wasn’t wrong. Whether on purpose or by accident, none of the gifts Yusei received on his birthday ever survived until next year. He would make scrap pieces out of them in a few weeks and then reassemble them into his own little projects. Sometimes he would even wreck his own creations to make new ones.

After the gift-giving was all wrapped up, Yusei thanked everyone for their presents, then swiftly turned on his heels and looked up at Martha with rosy cheeks.

“So,” he said with hushed, ill-contained joy, “can we... have the cake now?”

“Of course we can,” she said.

Normally everyone would wait until the end of the party to cut the cake but when you’re in charge of a stampede of children, you learn that the sooner you can get the sugar in and out of their systems, the better. Waiting until the end of the party meant a later attempt in sending cake-fueled children to bed and that was just not going to happen.

So halfway through the festivities, she brought out the cake. She lamented it was so small -- there was only enough to give every kid a single thin slice -- but one of the kids excitedly proclaimed that it was even bigger than the last birthday cake they had had.

“It is _not!_ ” Jack objected. He stomped over to Martha with the angriest of pouts on his face and tugged at her skirt. “Tell them Martha!” he demanded. “Tell them it isn’t bigger than mine!”

“Jack,” Martha wanted to pacify him but children can be cruel, even when they don’t truly mean to be, and any attempt she could make to lie about the cake’s size would surely result in the kids calling out her bluff to make Jack feel better. “Jack,” she tried again after her initial pause, “didn’t you tell me that a king gives to his people?”

“Yeah?”

“That was why you shared your cup ramen with everyone during your birthday, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You all remember that and are very grateful to Jack about it, aren’t you, children?” she spoke to the others.

A guilty chorus of “Yeah...” answered her, much to Jack’s smugness.

“So,” she continued, “it doesn’t matter whose cake is bigger. What matters is that we got another cake and we’re all going to share it. Isn’t that right, Yusei?”

“Yeah!” he pumped his fists into the air.

Martha grinned, triumphant and pleased. Crisis averted.

They all ate cake. Jack ultimately admitted that this cake _was_ a little bigger than his, though not before boasting that his tasted better. None of the kids remembered enough about the previous cake’s flavor to argue with him about it and Yusei didn’t give a damn as long as everyone got cake, so Martha didn’t bother revealing that it was the exact same recipe, just a bigger amount.

The rest of the afternoon and evening was spent playing “party games.” These involved singing songs at the top of their lungs (unfortunately, no one could convince Yusei to sing along with the others; he would bashfully mumble some lyrics before retreating into his fortress of gifts); many, many guessing games where the clues ran the gamut from descriptions to smells; and lastly, running around the yard in circles playing an improvised version of tag that involved shouting colors, card types and attributes, all while stopping in the middle of a chase for impromptu rock-paper-scissors sessions whenever the temporary referee yelled “Duel Time!”

It was only about an hour before bed time that all the kids lied down on the picnic blankets to stare at the star-less night above, tuckered out and sweaty.

All of them, that was, but the birthday boy, who somehow became increasingly restless the longer the day got. She was making her way to his side when she spotted a pair of men led by Dr. Schmidt coming their way. Yusei gasped excitedly, leaping to his feet and swirling into a mad rush that nearly caused him to crash into her.

“Martha,” he beamed at her as he grabbed her skirt and yanked in the direction of the incoming guests. “You have to come see this!”

“What is it?” she asked cautiously.

“You have to come and see it,” he urged.

He got a hold of her hand and led her forward and across the tiny field of children and blankets on grass.

The men accompanying Dr. Schmidt were wheeling in what appeared to be a large board with a heavy sheet draped over it. The doctor pulled with him a small wagon carrying a strange device in it and he carried a couple of extension cords coiled around one shoulder.

“Here should be fine,” he said to them. “Thank you very much for your assistance.”

“No problem, doc,” the older of the two replied. He waved to Yusei as he and his friend took their leave, “Happy birthday, little guy!”

“Thank you!” Yusei waved back.

“Is this,” Martha asked as she ran her hand over the sheet, “that... mystery... project you two had going on?”

Schmidt wheeled the wagon directly behind the board and adjusted the device on it, tilting it to face the back of it.

“It is indeed,” the man said. He plugged the device to the extension cords and handed one of the coils to Yusei. “You know what to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

Yusei slowly walked away from the device as he unfurled the coils and disappeared into the house, presumably to plug it up.

“I can only have it up for about fifteen minutes tonight. I had to borrow it from a friend and it just drains too much energy to keep for long.”

“What is it already?! I’m just about to lose my patience with you two, I _swear_.”

“I’ll show you!” Yusei’s voice declared as he ran back into view. He grabbed the sheet and pulled it off in one swoop. He would have brought the whole board down had Schmidt not had the foresight to hold it in place.

Little gasps followed Martha’s own. It was a blackboard with countless perforations scattered all around and paint splattered on to resemble stardust.

“You made this?”

“Yusei showed me pictures from an old astronomy book I once picked out before moving here. I did a rough sketch on the board and a group of generous helpers made the holes. After that, I gave Yusei a few instructions on how to, uh,” he made a flickering motion, “how to paint the stardust right. But he was the one who spent hours choosing and mixing the right colors and getting them to flicked on the right side of the board.”

“I chose the picture with the red and the green, the blue, the yellow and the orange,” Yusei added. He scrambled to open up a textbook that was almost half his side. “‘Cause you said, ‘cause you told me that you liked all the colors of the rainbow.”

“I said that?”

“Yeah, once! Uhhh, a long time ago? I asked you and you said so.”

“Right, of course.” She ran a hand through his messy, inexplicable hair and turned back to the board. She could swear it on her life that it was the greatest work of art she had ever seen in her life, museums be damned. “Yusei, it’s _gorgeous!_ ”

“And look at the best part!”

He tried to snap his little fingers at Schmidt, but failed spectacularly. He was too pumped, though, so instead he compensated by making finger guns and quiet pew-pewing at the old man. He chuckled at the cue and shook his head, leaned forward and flipped a switch at the device.

A stunning light shone from it, and while it obscured the light coming from the house, making it harder to see the stardust painted on the front of the board, it poured perfectly through the tiny holes on the board.

It was the starriest night she ever witnessed at the Satellite.


End file.
